January 23, 2007

The "U.S.A." some of the students were chanting stands for a three-word insult, an unsporting acronym the first letter of which stands for "You."

Fans at athletic events have been trying to sneak a few such cheers with double meanings past officials, leading administrators to tighten enforcement of WIAA rules and causing some students and parents to wonder what's wrong with a little team spirit.

So, kids, if there is something you don't like, make up a second meaning for it, pass it around, have a few laughs, and make the adults go nuts and ban it.

I remember the fun we had in 9th grade biology by deciding that the word "mutate" would refer a particular rude bodily function. What are you kids laughing about??!!

I'm waiting for the kids to get together and decide that every day is opposite day. The whole school system will collapse within a week.

Parent: What is the problem with little Johnny? Why did you suspend him?Principal: He told Mrs. Jones that she was a very beautiful woman and he liked her very much. Even worse he said she was an excellent teacher and he hoped she lived a long healthy life!!! Mrs. Jones is still crying.

At which point the parent would probably sue the school system and win. Having taught various age levels without much in the way of school support for discipline I feel for the teachers. I personally will never teach again.

Does anyone else have the sense that this is so past its season, so stale? Some feverish clot of old Baby Boomers fretting whether somebody might possibly feel "uncomfortable" because of what some kids chant?

Talk about out of touch. There are large groups of young people in mosques around the world chanting "Death to America [and all it stands for]." Some of those mosques are in places like Detroit and New Jersey.

And they worry about "U Suck Ass."

There's probably no better vignette of what's wrong with 'education' in America. Repeated, persistent emphasis on things that do not matter, to the detriment of those that do -- social, geo-political, and academic.

This might be overkill by the Baraboovians, but maybe it's an unceasing chant. That would be annoying. Maybe they can chant, to the same cadence, Not That Chant. Or, I propose some alternatives from my own past:

Back when I worked for Square D, we had to attend a series of "Quality" seminars for whatever the latest management fad was. Someone suggested that the word "amazing" should be our code word for "bullshit". So, "that's amazing" became one of the more frequent comments heard at the training sessions. (In an unrelated development, the company closed up shop within 5 years.)

I love the comment that the authorities knew about this because students told them. Is it not a time honored tradition for students to prank adults by telling them all sorts of crap? We did the same as teenagers but not as successfully, damn it.

(I recall a group of us once putting music together for a church dance. We got one borderline song through by making up positive shit about what it meant and nuked a song none of us liked by doing the opposite. [In more than one case, the adult leader was on to us, but played along since all he needed was credible cover.])

A similar chant to Doug's from a wealthy private school when I was growing up:

WE'VE GOT SPIRITWE'VE GOT RULEWE'VE GOT THE MONEY TO BUY YOUR SCHOOL

I guess I can't be too bothered by kids being kids. They try to hurt each other's feelings and in some ways are probably have less sensitive feelings than we do.

Some of those kids will grow up and look back on it with some disgust but mostly a chuckle. Some others will continue on being idiots. Is this any different that the generations before this one? I think not.

This story was right in keeping with the cupcake fatwa Ann featured a month or so ago -- file it away under oxymoron, as in more nonsense from the public school bureaucracy.

That high school kids come up with rude, sex-focused chants to berate the other team can't be news to anyone (I assume that's the intended meaning of "USA, USA" to the gnostic initiates here). The wonderful PC sentiments of the school bureaucrats -- the article says they only allow positive, clean-cut cheers for the home team, but nothing aimed at the opposing team -- has the inane features of all other PC speech codes. It also has the added feature of being self defeating, since if "USA, USA" can be banned on these grounds, pretty much anything else is open to the same fate since the kids will always be free to give the most innocuous chant whatever secondary meaning they want.

It's as if the school authorities see themselves as the idiotic heavies in pretty much every movie set in an American high school ever made -- Grease, the Ramones, you name it -- and insist on playing to type. Sadly, nothing new there either.

The article doesn't really go into the full background of the cheers and related rude behavior of the students. I have friends who are school administrators in that athletic conference. The USA cheer is the closest they come to clever. The majority of the cheers are picking on the economic or racial characteristics (real or perceived) of the players. While they are careful never to use the obvious words to get them tossed, it is equally obvious to everyone, including the players, as to what is going on. They truly have crossed the line.

These kids are emulating the student section at UW Madison, which consistently cheers such profound chants as "Eat Shit" (one side of the section) "Fuck You" (the other side of the section. Call me old fashioned, but sporting events used to be a great place for me to take my 10 year old. Not anymore.

LOL, this has little to do with PCism and much to do with the time-honored tradition of students finding new ways to do something taboo without appearing to break the rules followed by adults futilely trying to quash those attempts.

So they'll ban chanting "USA" and the kids will just come up with something else.

After being defeated by Thurn und Taxis in the 1700s, the Tristero organization goes underground and continues to exist, with its mailboxes in the least suspected places, often appearing under their slogan W.A.S.T.E., an acronym for We Await Silent Tristero's Empire, and also a smart way of hiding their post-boxes disguised as regular waste-bins.

I never read that one, but I read about in it in one of Robert Anton Wilson's books, where one of the characters believes it, partly as a result of too much speed.

Adidas is sometimes said to stand for "All Day I Dreamed About Sex" or "Scoring"--actually the company was owned by a guy called Adi Dassler.